Works

‘Feed me’ is a game for kids. There in their little hands lay the fate of all animals in the zoo. The goal is to create a path that’ll guide new employees throught all the different actions that need to be done to make animals’ stomachs no longer empty.

The game is designed to help children understand the basics of algorithms. It can be the first step in their software development adventure!

Before starting to create the actual algorithms the player is asked to design its own zoo. Kids love this kind of puzzles. The game elements are created in a way that there are a lot of possible zoo setups. The only restriction is that the roads must be placed in a way that the zoo keeper is able to visit each and every animal to feed it.

In the next step we put away the roads. Below every pice taken there are four squares. Each of this empty squares is a place in which the player can put one action for zoo keeper to perform.

Now the player recieves a set of cards which represents all the possible actions. There are four types of actions available: move, turn left, turn right, feed the animal. in this step the player can design the road for the zoo keeper to guide him through this maze of hungry animals using only the available action cards.

If you want to make designing the path a little bit easier you can use the X cards. When there is an X card in the square that means no action can be placed there. This limits the number of possible action choises and thus makes the decision easier for the player. Complete beginners can of course build a lot smaller zoo with fewer animals. No one is able to feed all the tigers and elephants on their first day! By encouraging the player to build bigger zoo every time and guide the zoo keeper through it your young padawan will learn the basics of building alghoritms in no time. And all that having a lot of fun!